Your Views: Books, speech shed light on income inequality

The income inequality issue supposedly has replaced the Affordable Care Act as the issue. I don’t believe that for a minute. However, let’s take a look at the problem. We now have a class of people who choose not to work.

First, simply look at the number of people who have simply dropped out of the current labor market—period. Then consider what has happened to the impact of the welfare systems that both the United Kingdom and United States have created over the last 30 or 40 years.

The story of the U.K. is best told by Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom” published here in the U.S. in 2001. Dalrymple is a doctor who worked for the U.K welfare system and wrote a series of powerful essays covering what he saw on a daily basis.

Here in the U.S., Charles Murray has written a well-documented book statistically illustrating the breakdown of the class structure. The title is “Coming Apart.”

I have read both, and they clearly lead to questions of legislative intentions vs outcomes. Supplementing these two books is a speech given by Marvin Olasky at the Manning Centre’s annual Networking Conference in Canada last year. The title: “Effective Compassion—Choosing a different path to stop the downward spiral of government dependence.” Olasky is the editor in chief of WORLD News Group.